Category Archives: Pies

Having staggered painfully out of 2011 with nasty, mean gallstones that put a serious curb on a lot of end of year activities, 2012 started with no rapid prospect of a resolution until a call last Thursday to offer me someone else’s cancelled surgery slot for yesterday. Which means I’m typing this on the Touchpad my lovely brother so kindly gave me for my 40th, while snuggled under a duvet recovering from yesterday’s op.

So while I’m obviously a bit sore and battered at the moment, the knowledge that all the pain I’ve had since July is done with is more than compensation for a couple of weeks’ recovery, not least because it brings a particular dream a lot closer.

The dream? Well, we’re going to open a shop. And it will only sell yummy gluten-free things. Assuming the recovery goes well, we’ll be soft launching around Valentine’s Day, so it’s about to get quite busy round here. On the menu? Cakes, salads, snacks, soups… and art, since that’s long been a part of the plan. Sort of art and tarts, really.

Still a couple of experiments to go before we can include them in the shop, which I will obviously share here, for good or ill 😉

If there’s one thing I really ought to do, it’s finish off – for now at least – my gluten-free pork pie experiment posts. To recap, I had done a little research, as I was sickening for a decent pork pie, worked out a couple of recipes to fiddle with to see what might result, and then done the initial experiment. All that was lacking – from the blog, at any rate – was the results of that process… which is when the computer and other issues kicked in.

And this is what we ended up with, although the camera flash has bleached it out a bit. Once chilled, the pies had a delicious filling and jelly – good – and a nice, crunchy crust. However, for all that the crust was crunchy, it was realistically also a bit hard. Not tough the way a crust with gluten can go, because from experience it’s pretty much impossible to overwork a gluten-free flour.

It’s entirely possible I’m being too demanding, of course, and that this is as good as it gets, but since it’s only my first attempt at a raised crust, I’m convinced at this point that there has to be a way of improving upon it and getting a result that is crunchy on the outside, but tender and crumbly enough to have that proper melt in the mouth texture I associate with Mum’s pork pies in my childhood. Fingers crossed!

Having thought I was ready to get on and start baking yesterday afternoon, it turned out I was wrong. I’m not sure how I managed to mislay a packet of lard from the fridge. After all, I don’t cook with it all that often. But it wasn’t there and I wasn’t about to start playing with more variables than the flour on the first attempt.

So, after a fruitless walk to the little Tesco on Whitechapel and a rather more productive trip up to Sainsbury’s on Cambridge Heath Road – on the bus, much to Harvey’s delight – we were finally able to get on and start work on the pies.

In the end, I decided to combine elements of the recipe from Lorraine Pascale’s Baking Made Easy and the method from Merrilees Parker’s recipe. The balance felt slightly better on the ingredients – not least Ms Pascale’s understanding that flour can be more or less thirsty, which is often a problem with gluten-free flours – but given the lack of gluten I was not convinced I wanted to let the pastry chill and then try to work it – it would be friable enough when warm or even room temperature, cold it would potentially be impossible to use. So I stuck with the Parker recipe for the method, forming the pastry while still warm. With the adjustments for using gluten-free flour (Dove’s Farm plain flour), this is the recipe I used:

NB: If you have Lorraine Pascale’s book, you’ll know that her recipe (page 84) calls for 180ml water, and that you may not use all of it. I upped that to 200ml from the start, then found myself adding extra as I worked the dough. Gluten-free flour is seriously thirsty.

As instructed, I put all the dry ingredients in a bowl, added the egg yolk and then let Harvey stir them all together while I melted the lard and butter into the water and then brought that mix to a boil.

I then shooed him out the way and poured the molten fat and water mix into a well in the dry mix and stirred it quickly to form quite a firm dough. Harvey helped, but found the dough too firm for him to stir, and then too hot for him to work with his hands. Since I have asbestos hands, however, I was able to work the dough rather better and was therefore able to add the extra water it needed, which took it up to the total of 230ml.

I then separated it into two lumps – one third and two thirds – and then separated these into four balls each, since we were going to be making pies using some nice little foil dishes I’d picked up rather than the muffin tins Lorraine Pascale suggests.

The next bit was great fun as it involved squidging the pastry into place in the dishes and up the sides to create the body of the case. This is a perfect job for a 4 year old. We then popped in the filling – the one bit we had been able to make earlier! – which was coarsely minced pork loin steaks (480g pack) and pancetta (75g) with a little salt, pepper and nutmeg. This, it turns out, is another job that mummies should leave to their children. Finally, we used our last four balls of pastry to squash out lids to put on the pies, pinching them onto the cases where they met at the edges. Harvey did admit this bit was a little more tricky, but he gave it a good go.

H marks the spot - Harvey makes sure we know which pie is his

And so we had pies. We slit the tops to let the steam out, and then popped them in the oven at 200C. While the recipe says 30-35 minutes, our pies were going to be bigger, so we took them out after about 50 minutes.

The first thing I noticed was that the whole tray was swimming in fat. The pastry had pulled in from the foil cases and you could see fat between the two. Were it not for the crisp, golden pastry in front of me, the whole thing would have looked very unappealing. On the other hand, I wasn’t too sorry to know we’d be losing some of the fat from the recipe before eating the finished product, so I mopped up the fat on the tray with kitchen towels (NEVER pour this down the sink, please!) and, when the pies were cool enough to handle, popped them out onto some more kitchen towels so they wouldn’t either reabsorb more fat as they cooled, or just end up coated in a layer of white fat: bleeeurgh.

Gluten-free pork pies - looking good for a first effort

One thing you might notice on the photo above is how the neat slits have changed into rather rough holes. That’s because the pastry resealed itself in the oven and I needed to knock holes in the crusts to pour the jelly in. Ahem. So, notwithstanding Harvey’s desire to put an initial on his pie, it will be less effort for future batches to simply make a proper hole in the lid before baking.

It has to be said that the crust, when the pies first cooled, was a nice shell on the outside, just as I had hoped it would be. Since I seem to remember that pork pies were originally used to preserve the meat and that the pastry was used purely as a case to be discarded when it came to finally eating the thing, the only way that worked was if the case would withstand a certain amount of punishment. So we at least have something authentic here. Still, I wiggled in a small blade, hooked out a bit of lid, and poured in some jelly, which I’m sure will have softened the crust slightly by the time we come to eat the pies.

Now, I have to confess I cheated with the jelly. After the length of time we spent just buying lard yesterday afternoon, I simply could not be bothered to make a proper vegetable stock, and didn’t have any left in the freezer. I simply melted my gelatine, used half a Knorr vegetable stockpot, a couple of splashes of pinot grigio and enough water to top it up to half a pint. Tasted OK on the spoon, and while it’s far from what I’d consider ideal, there was a fairly serious ‘life’s too short’ argument going on by that point. I poured it in until it started seeping out of the join of the lid, popped the pies in the fridge, then topped them up a little later to the brim of the holes.

So, the photo above was taken this morning of my first ever gluten-free pork pies, complete with jelly – that’s what the shiny patch is on the lid of the bottom pie. I will admit that the three of us ate one of the pies last night, purely to check the seasoning before I put the jelly together. After all, you want to make sure the tastes complement each other. Well, that was our excuse. The pastry was – at that point – marvellously crunchy and lacking the bitter aftertaste my husband deplores in commercial pork pies. The filling was delicious, although not perhaps so traditional, given the pancetta was smoked, and one would normally use green bacon. All that was missing was the jelly.

And that, dear readers, is where I shall leave you, for it is time to put together a couple of salads and try the properly finished product. Full verdict from all the family – and photos – later…

Pork pies. I used to love them. My husband still does, but only when they’re well-made, which apparently most aren’t, these days. Our son is also a fan, but rather less discriminating than his Dad, by all accounts. And since you can’t buy them gluten-free in the shops, I’ve not eaten one in years.

I would probably have been content with occasional pining, but the new migraine drugs I’m on are doing some very odd things to my appetite at the moment and, having seen someone this morning scoffing a pork pie, I suddenly really wanted one myself. As in really, really wanted one so badly that ignoring it wasn’t going to make the wanting go away.

So, accepting the inevitable, I thought I’d better investigate and see how one is supposed to make such things in the world of wheat, before having a bash at a gluten-free version, as I’ve never before made a pork pie.

I’ve often found the UKTV website a good starting point for recipes when I need to find something I can adapt, not least because they always seem to have several versions of the same finished product and you can get a better feel for how things will work, which is quite important for me as I can’t go making up and tasting a version with wheat flour first to use as a ‘control’ for my gluten-free experiments. Well, not without making myself ill, anyway.

So the first recipe I looked at was Mike Robinson’s ‘proper old-fashioned pork pie’. I certainly like the way it’s turned out in the picture, but it’s clearly not the pork pie I’m hankering after, because it’s not a raised crust. And while I agree that a traditional pork pie relies on the flavour of the meat, rather than smothering it in herbs and other seasonings, I can work out the filling part for myself. It’s time to move on to another recipe.

Same site, different recipe, and this one looks far more promising, not least because by this point I’ve fished out my Lorraine Pascale when I went to grab a coffee to help the search. Ms Pascale’s method seems to agree in the main with this one for the pastry, although she omits the jellied stock, which I think is rather a shame. Still, as she says, some people really don’t like the jelly, but I really do. Not sure I can be bothered to trawl the East End for a pig’s trotter – living in a Muslim area has some minor drawbacks at times like these – but I’m sure I can make a nice stock to dissolve some gelatine.

So, I have all my pastry ingredients, some pork, some pancetta (run out of bacon – oops), some gelatine and plenty of time to put together a decent stock. Now all I need is for my glamorous 4 year old assistant to finish his nap and we can begin.

Of course, in all this, I’ve realised there is no quick fix to my craving for a pork pie. Given that I daren’t make these without my son – he conked while I was researching recipes and is fully expecting to be part of the ‘sperimenting’ – plus the prep and cooking time, then the cooling and setting time, I won’t be wrapping myself round one of these until tomorrow at the earliest. But that’s OK. Since I’ve had to dig the mincer out to make the filling for the pie, we’ll be making some gluten-free sausages this afternoon as well and, believe me, there’ll be no waiting around for those 🙂